


vital signs

by marketchippie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Knifeplay, Survivor Guilt, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 22:06:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3912334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>False Jedi</i> rings in his head. It sounds like a lie when she says it. He wants her to say it again.</p><p>(In the dungeon of Citadel Ventress, three weeks without the Force's guidance.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	vital signs

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the comics exactly from [this](http://36.media.tumblr.com/9c0f94bbad9dc2b486ae218a14c6ee41/tumblr_nm7zduwWCY1sq7bwzo1_400.png) up to Republic #60: Hate & Fear; also mentions preceding events in the tie-in novel The Cestus Deception, though none of these are necessary references. Pre-show.
> 
> Dedicated to Maddi (belinsky), whom I blame in at least five ways.

Obi-Wan wakes up in the dark, dead. Seeing nothing, feeling nothing, alone.

No. That’s not right. He knows better. Were he dead, he’d be given over to the Force, not to the complaints of the body. Now all he has is bruises and battlefield leftovers, and a dark cloud swarming through his thoughts. And the Force, terrifyingly distant, on the far side of that cloud.  So it is that he is alive, for certain values of it. The shadow is swallowing him, digesting him slowly. He will be left for nothing, for the dark to pick at his bones: he is alive, motionless, and the Force is gone from him.

He cannot move. Cannot speak. Cannot see, and now in double-blindness, Force-robbed in a dark cell, the pain begins to set in. A hot ache between his shoulders, travelling down the sore muscles of his arms, the ragged skin around his shackled wrist. Pain slowly reawakens his limbs, and he learns them like they’re new: he hangs from the wall, arms spread, manacles around his wrists and ankles. When he moves, the sound they make is deafening, breaks the damp silence. Metal scrapes over his chafed wrists and he startles at the sound of his own faint groan: how long has he been alone in the dark?

He is glad to be alone, then, that Anakin cannot see him like this, and he blinks and feels, beneath the fog of pain, beneath the darkness, something clench in him. _Anakin_ —beyond wondering at, out of his thoughts, out of his grasp. He thinks he should be more afraid. Instead: silence in his head, silence without, a red and aching fog dulling his thoughts. Keeping him from panic, which keeps him from having to contain it. That’s a mercy, perhaps. He’s alive and intact, which means the Force must be within him, working, somewhere, somehow. If he cannot feel it. Cannot, cannot.

His limbs wake up and his thoughts straggle after, his memories. Fire, battle, falling—

The door opens. Lets a hooded figure slip into the room. A brief, scalding burst of light slices through his vision and lets him see sharp white features under the hood. Then the door closes, and lanterns dance in his eyes, mocking him. Blinking, his eyes readjust, and as the figure steps closer he can see the face and the long hands leaching at the shadow, smudging pale spots into the darkness as she moves.

He is about to speak her name when he feels something pressing against his cracked lips. Smooth, leathern: a mask over his face. Nothing is free but his eyes. Watching, as she pulls her hood back, bare skull nearly aglow in the dark.

She steps in, near enough that he should be able to feel her, to pick up her dark footprints through the Force. Instead, he is at the mercy of his weak eyes, his trapped body. He sees the dark sharp line of her smile, growing.

“You’re awake.”

He opens his mouth to speak, feels the slick pressure on his lips, and is quiet instead. Waiting to feel her, feel himself, for the Force to sink into his thoughts, order them, make sense and peace of them. Then he can fight. There is no pain so great it can keep the Force from him for long.

She draws close, and the peace does not come, nor even the fear he should feel at its absence. All he can do is look, try to make sense of the world through his eyes alone. He can see her perfectly the moment before she raises her hand.

Then she slaps him and he feels it dully, through the fabric. Such a distant addition to the rest of the pain in his body, it hardly belongs to him. She backhands him again, and he shakes his head as best he can. Her hand is under his chin, beneath the edge of the mask, where his neck is left bare.

“Who are you?” she asks, and he laughs, for her hand is on him and her chains are on his body and she of all presumptuous souls in the galaxy should know him in an instant. Her nails dig into the skin of his throat as she pushes up his face, forces his eyes to meet hers. “I want to hear you say it.”

His tongue is thick and dry in his mouth, as reluctant to move as the rest of him. He swallows against her cool palm, speaks clearly as he can against the cloth. “As I want to know what you’ve done to me.”

Raising a brow and a hand, she flicks one of the chains. The ripple travels down to his shackled wrist, not designed to hurt— _not yet,_ one quick-rising thought warns—but hurting nonetheless. He winces, doesn’t make a sound, but her other hand is still on his throat and she can feel it. And he cannot feel her, and he does not fear the shackles, but this, _this_ —

“First things first. Name. Rank.”

“General Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he growls, “Knight of the Jedi Order.”

“Even now?”

She smiles. She knows. The Force’s distance—her doing. Of course. The hand on his throat glides over the mask, and he has been a fool. Over the crown of his head, capped in metal beneath the leather that clings to his face and his skull. “Even now,” she says, answering her own question with a smile, “prideful. So much the better. I want you whole in body and in mind.”

“Take this off and you’ll have plenty of me,” he hisses, and she shakes her head slowly. 

“The Force won’t protect you now.” The dark line of her lips curls up, bares teeth. “I want you to know where you are and how you got here without its help. You will tell me everything I ask.”

Where her hand goes he feels his scalp prickle, his skin crawl. This is Sith work, Sith craftsmanship clinging to his skin. Sith keeping the Force at arm’s length. He recognizes it now, the press of corrupted energy on his skin, in his thoughts, and for a moment he swears he can smell fire in the cool damp of the cell, can feel his skin singe. He feels how he might die, then; he has seen what such a death would be like: he hasn’t been this shrouded in Sith presence, this choked with it, since Maul. Since he watched Qui-Gon fall.

He thinks, calmly: This is the end of the world. And, strangely, thinking of his weakness and of his master’s death, he feels more a Jedi than ever.

She holds up his chin. “Where did I defeat you?”

_You didn’t_ —though the thought is reflex more than fact, and present circumstances do somewhat weaken his argument. His detail recall is, at the moment, somewhat flawed. He opens his mouth again, feeling the mask tighten along his temples and cheeks and under her fingers. It is shaped to his head, near soldered to him around the eyes and ears. Loose only around the mouth. It wants to let him speak.

Or scream, offer his ever-helpful thoughts.

He will not comply. Even now, chained, burning, fogged, weak, he won’t speak of _defeat_. A beat of silence before her hand leaves his neck, curls into a fist. This time she hits him with a closed fist, and he does not have the protection of the mask when it hits home. The throat, again. Her fist knocks the air whistling out of him, sends him gasping. Every breath hurts.

“Not,” he notes, when he manages his first shallow breath, “a quick way to make me speak.”

“I’m only giving you easy questions today, Kenobi.”

The back of his mouth tastes of metal. He cannot tell whether or not he’s swallowing blood. “Where did you fall?” Another blow, exactly where the first fell. On the battlefield she’s rash and fast and blind with fear, her fighting techniques as fractured and weak as all Darksiders, but he will give his enemy her due: let none say she is imprecise. “Where did your troops fall?” Another, her fist steady as a drill. “Where was your failed mission? Say its name.”

“We came from Jabiim,” he says, swallowing. His words, not hers. She knows. Why does it matter? “And you’re wasting your energy, Ventress.”

Once more she smiles, dark but real. “Then I don’t have to ask my final question. You know who you are, and where you are now, and you know the name of who it is that will break you.”

This time, he does not have breath in him to laugh. There is blood under his tongue, definite this time. She turns to leave the cell before he can swallow it.

The slam of the door jars his chains once more, and the cell is dark and perfect in its solitude once more. Alone, he is swathed in thoughts that refuse to take shape, in the Sith energy that swallows him and keeps him from the Force.

Now, alone, unwatched, he tries to struggle. To brace himself against the wall, pull at the chains. He pulls til the skin of his wrists bleeds, the pain of broken skin like two red sunbursts—one at each wrist. It focuses him just enough for him to realize that he is useless like this. Alone, he thinks: _weak_.

There is one reward to this: he batters himself between wall and ceiling until the pain overwhelms him and swallows him whole. Weak to it, he lets it take him out of the fog in his thoughts and the swamp of emotion sucking underfoot. Emotion is nearer than the Force, and nearly tempting. It would be something to overcome.

But there is pain for that, first. The persistent test of pain. He feels, and he sees, and the rest of the world retreats. And there’s nothing to look at in the cell. He lets his eyes drift shut. Behind them the world is red and throbbing. The pale echo of Ventress’s face dances in the periphery, the clearest thing in his head before he slips into the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes up with his cheek to the floor, arms hoisted behind his back, the whole of his back on steady fire. When he stretches, his muscles scream. He must learn to sleep more cleverly, conserve his energy when he wakes.

Pressing down, he finds he can bend his legs and just _nearly_ touch the floor, knees skimming a fingerwidth above the floor. Just short of kneeling. Meditation is out of his grasp, then—not that he can meditate, not that he can focus, not that he’s doing anything with this Force-cursed thing on his head. _Force-cursed_ , that’s right. No satisfaction at laughing at himself alone in the cell, though. He’s not mad. 

Conserve energy, conserve thought. Think little, try less, one thing at a time: his head reaches a pipe on the ceiling when he reaches out, the wall when he slumps back. The back of his head is rough, tender, his own doing. In its own way, that’s a victory for him. The pain doesn’t belong to them—to her.

Unlike the rest of him. He is a mass of battle-beatings, sore and scratched, but not deeply wounded. There is a broad warped burn on his right shoulder, from a barely-dodged blaster shot. When he stretches he feels the skin threaten to crack, so he keeps still. His head aches most of all. There’s a bruise at his temple as well as the raw ache at the back of his skull, just as tender. He was knocked unconscious on Jabiim, taken there.

At least he didn’t lose blood. Yet.

He looks down as best he can through the mask, straining his neck. There’s a necklace of bruises down his shirt, coloring his chest in the shape of Ventress’s knuckles. She hits hard and clean, and they hurt, but they’ll heal within the day. A small twinge of energy rises up within him as he stares down, focusing on the specific tender line of them, isolating their pain from the rest. A hint of warmth and calm at the back of his mind. He could heal them now. There is enough of the Force left in him.

No. He can’t let it go to waste. Much as he wants to exult, to give himself over to the Force for one last second, peaceful and perfect in it, let it make him whole as it can, he can’t let this last spark of energy go to waste.

It would be an act of defiance. As with laughter, there’s no sense in wasting the spirit while he’s alone.

The door opens; he stiffens, braces himself, but it’s only a droid, carrying a tray of food. “And how does she expect me to eat this?” he asks the thing with a rattle of one wrist—foolish, painful, wasted on the metal.

In answer, the droid holds out its thin metal arms. Delicate metal pincers peel the lowermost portion of his mask up, the sole place where the fabric is somewhat loose, and he works not to shudder.

Then the droid holds a spoon up to his mouth, full of some uncooked Rattataki chum. “The prisoner will not die of starvation,” it says in its tinny voice.

Pride gets in the way. But he’s not starving. Not yet, and the droid’s put itself in range. He jars his heels against the wall, brings his head down hard, and it is sweet to watch the thing go toppling over onto the damp stone floor.

It whines, the sound of angry metal, and the whine gets louder, until it rises into a full-fledged alarm. The door opens once more, and her cape swishes in ahead of her, her boots loud on the stone. She sets her foot on the droid’s head, kicking her heel against some hidden switch, and the stupid thing is silent. “You can dispense with the theatrics,” he says. “They’ve lost whatever sway they might have had.”

“You lecture me about theatrics, Kenobi?” She pulls her hood back, nudges the droid back into standing. “An ambassador of the smoke-and-mirrors Jedi temple puts _me_ to the question? Go,” she says, and the droid whirs out of the room, the door closing in its wake far more politely than it does in hers.

“I’d love to,” he says, watching it wheel out. “Your friend seems it’d make a pleasant guide to—the famous Citadel Ventress, is it, that I find myself visiting?”

“You’re welcome.” Her gaze, cool and blue, sweeps over him and the cell alike. “Though you’re a rude guest. Refusing to eat?” She steps in, reaches out. “That old trick?”

The mask is still peeled back around his mouth, and her fingers land on his skin, nails sharp against his lips. This time he does startle. His body is a tight raw wound, fever-hot, blood-rushing, and her fingers are cool, her nails sharp, as a fresh-drawn knife. Her eyes are full of cold blue light and he regrets. Makes himself as still as he can. Stone-still, solitary, untouchable.

It is difficult. There is no peace without the Force, and what of that little is left in him—the small, intact spark—feels her as acutely as his skin. For perhaps the first time he’s encountered her, she does not need to mask herself, and her skill and sensitivity fills the room. Unchecked without his to counter it.

She is standing close, and the Force’s dark echo pushes her still closer.

He will not let her see how much of her he feels. Still, silent: above all, he must not _satisfy_ his enemy. A fruitless wish, now, with her eyes aglow and her chains around him, but he must deny her as much as he can, even if it is only his words. His breath. Patience, he has, even if he has nowhere to go with it. That, above all, she lacks; he knows that from experience. It makes her rash, and here it will make her cocksure, and she will fall.

_Know your enemy, bring them into your heart._ The Force within them is meant to be strong enough to pull even the darkest back into the light. Knowledge is the first weapon against the Dark Side, which blinds its constituents. Let her eyes shine. They’ll be seeing shadow soon enough.

But shine they do, now, shine she does. She runs her tongue between her teeth, terrible in her satisfaction, presumptuous with it. He’s seen bloodthirst in her eyes in battle; it’s worse, he sees now, when the blood is on her lips. “You’ve been long overdue a visit here,” she says. “When I want you to starve, you’ll starve. When I want you to feel pain, you’ll feel it in abundance. But I’m not starving you now.” Her eyes flit to the door and back. “And if something goes wrong here, it won’t be a droid ruining it, nor you breaking before I let you. I’ve planned this.”

“So you do see your own ruin.” He allows a smile, feels how her hand moves to trace it on his mouth. She grips his chin like she wants to pin his expressions in place, tugs on his beard. “I know you’re not a fool, Ventress. Only misguided.”

Her cool, sharp-nailed hand slaps him across the mouth. Easy, open, not as hard as she might. The fact that he tastes blood is an echo of his split lip, her sharp nails. She’s keeping her strength in reserve, he knows that instinctively. As is he.

Stars’ end, he is thirsty, though. He lets himself imagine a version of the morning where he took a sip from a droid’s cup—no, he can’t hold the image in his head. There is a time and place for humility, and it is not in Asajj Ventress’s dungeon.

“You’ll eat,” she says. “You’ll drink. Then you’ll tell me a thing or two about the Republic’s strongholds, and if you’re a good boy, I’ll give you news of your padawan.”

Absolute, freezing stillness. Cold rage and cold fear. In the absence of the Force, it feels quite peaceful. “What have you done?”

“Whole armies on the fields of Jabiim,” she says, voice soaked in triumph, “and you credit me. I’m flattered.”

He swore to himself he’d give her nothing, no information and no ground, and he shakes with the effort, now, of holding back. Clenching his fists, he feels his hands shake, hard enough to rattle the chains, to knock his shackles back against the raw patches on his wrists. The pain focuses him. Gives him something to breathe into. Blood seeps into the lines of his palms, and his head is clearer than it has been in all his imprisonment.

_All one day, two days,_ however long he’s been awake it hasn’t been longer than a day. One day at a time, though. First:

_your padawan, your padawan, news of your padawan_

“Will you let me eat?” he asks, and she raises a brow.

“If I send for another droid, are you going to make trouble?”

“Come now,” he says. “Let a fellow serve himself.” He gestures as best he can to the cap on his head. Smiles beneath the mask, in spite of himself. He can feel the rage thrumming in him, a precisely played instrument. This is the easiest way to wear it. “You’ve humbled me.”

There is an illicit pleasure in lying to the Sith. Not that Ventress is full Sith—she is not even that. He knows the knowledge makes her restless under her skin. Knows his lie does the same itchy work. _There is so much that you lack,_ he thinks, _that you will never have,_ and he smiles, he smiles, out of her reach in this if nothing else.

She puts a hand to one chain, where it loops up through the pipes and down again into her grasp, and pulls—his arm yanks back, the one with the burnt shoulder, and he gasps, pain blasting through his head. The skin does crack under his robes; he feels them going damp where they hit the wall, whether with blood or blistering he does not know. His dominant arm hanging over his head, she pulls another chain and his other arm goes slack. Testing it, he finds he can hardly reach his mouth. The lines of her nails still burn along his lips, and he wishes violently to brush them off, but he doesn’t have that much purchase.

“Don’t make trouble,” she says, like an invitation, and presses a button by the door.

Another droid arrives, a cleaner this time with a flat head on top of which rests a bowl of food and cup of water. She takes it and the droid whirs off in circles underfoot, cleaning the last of the earlier bowl off the floor. She steps around it and hands him the bowl. He can’t help wishing she’d leave. This, he likes least of all: her leaning against the wall and watching him, her idle measuring gaze as he tips the bowl back one-handed and swallows the raw slop inside. It’s _some_ kind of fish by the looks and smell of it, uncooked by the texture. White enough to show off grime on its flesh. There is no clean inch of the cell, perhaps no clean inch of Rattatak now that it’s been occupied: the planet is divided between ocean and dry cracking desert, the land stripped dry with heat and overbuilding. A Sith heartland, now. It will wear the darkness naturally, he thinks, under the miserable press of Ventress’s thumb.

The food goes down slick, leaves an unpleasant taste in his mouth, but it’s something. The bowl, he keeps, awkward in his hands. He can’t reach the floor and, though he rather wants to, he’s not going to throw it.

She takes it from his hand, does not give him the water in return. Instead she brings the cup to his lips, and he metes out his reaction, forces himself still once more. The cloud of the mask works in his favor. When he closes his eyes, the fog behind them is almost calming. The water is ice-cold but feels oily on his tongue, mixing badly with the blood in his mouth. Nevertheless, he swallows so hard it hurts, until the cup is empty.

She sets the empty cup and bowl back onto the droid’s head, sends it out, and then they are alone once more in the cell. “Your days must be long,” he remarks, “if this is how you spend them.”

A grin that curls like her saber-hilts: “There’s nowhere I’d rather be. You sound better like that. I’d prefer you to speak clearly when you give me the coordinates to the Republic hospital.”

Impractical as it would have been, he wishes he’d kept a last mouthful of water to spit at her feet. If not into her face. A child’s desires, unfocused and full of rage. He shrugs his twisted shoulder, leans into the pain and calms himself. “Get used to a clear no, Ventress.”

“Don’t you want to hear news of the fallen?”

And no pain is clearer than that—that threatening echo in his thoughts, _news of your padawan, your padawan_. “Not at a cost.”

“I know that you Jedi forget to weigh it,” she says, something cracking the pleasantry in her voice, “but everything has a cost.”

“Well, you can forget about my repaying you,” he says, and she slides out of her posture of ease like she’s slipping off another hood, another mask. She slips across the room, lithe and serpentine and furious, and in a moment she is standing so near at his side he can hear her breath echo against the leathery surface of the mask.

“Your padawan did.”

He twists his head, jolting his shoulder again, and he can hardly see her through the red, the pain and the fury that waits beneath it. “What did you do to Anakin?”

“I didn’t kill your ape apprentice,” she says, lip curling, and a spasm of relief goes through him before she continues. “I killed them all.

“The Republic of Jabiim is fallen,” she says, “and even sweeter, we slaughtered every padawan there. Including yours.”

He cannot see, cannot feel. Cannot reach into the Force and beg for truth, cannot reach for her and choke the truth from her throat. “Liar,” he spits, and the rage opens up like a mouth beneath the fog and he lets it swallow him.

It is an impure feeling, no escape from the pain. There is so much room for fear, and so much anguish, and he is alone in the room even as she is murmuring into his ear through the mask, so distant that he can hardly hear:

“I owed him a death,” she is saying, “as I owe you, but in the end, he was not important enough to kill alone. They all died. He wasn’t special, and you won’t be either. So you may as well give up now, Kenobi. Everything you love is dead. The best you can hope for is a painless death. I’ll let you bargain for something like it—”

The chain, the slack chain, wavers at his side, and he doesn’t think as he lunges.

Not for her, he can’t reach her, he knocks back and thinks what’s next, but he’s lost his _mind_ , not his reflexes, his heart, not his courage. He cannot tear her apart, but there’s someone within his reach, someone to blame: his head ducks down and he wraps the slack chain around his neck and yanks.

If he had his true strength he might have hope of a cracked neck and a quick death, rather than a slow strangling, but it’s the death on offer, anything will do, and he doesn’t deserve a better one, not if Anakin and half a hundred others died in the fields. The pain is new, agonizing, an ultraviolet rope through the red fog, but it’s a way out. His vision goes black and starlit and he closes his eyes, thinks _Anakin, I’m sorry_ —

Then he’s lifted off his feet, then he blinks and he can see and he doesn’t _wish_ to see but he can make out Ventress beneath him, raising her arm and glaring. The chain slips from around his neck and tightens back up against the rafters. “I told you not to make trouble when I did that,” she is saying as he slips out of consciousness. She puts down her hand; it shakes against her cape. How can he see such things, take in such details now? It is the last thing he sees. A carpet of soft black takes his vision, and he collapses and no longer has to look for the ghost of his padawan. _Anakin,_ he thinks, the last he can think, _find me while I sleep._

 

 

 

 

 

His sleep is lonely, his head held under black waves until wakefulness takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him. Awake _hurts_. Hurts double the day before. The raw bruises around his throat. The echo of battle behind his eyes.

It is night, grey Rattataki night, the cell’s high window tells him, and in its shadows he relives every battle he has ever fought, and every fallen comrade bears Anakin Skywalker’s face, and every enemy he ever cut down. And, mercifully alone, he weeps for him, and a thousand ghosts take his tears in silent tribute. His mouth tastes of salt. It is not enough. The ghosts reprimand him needlessly: he knows without their telling.

 

 

 

 

 

Ventress returns a few hours later, when his eyes are still raw but the light in the cell is newly pale and dingy. She measures him from the doorway. “And worse for wear today.”

“You’re a liar,” he says calmly.

“This again?” she asks. He remembers vaguely screaming the same at her the night before— _liar_ is a practiced scream in his raw throat. But he has had time to evaluate, since. The fish tasted bitter. She is is a Sith apprentice. The food is poison. She is a liar. Her words are poison. He is going mad in the cell, and she is goading him toward it. He can speak, today, levelly.

“I do not believe you.”

She watches him, waits for his resolve to crack. Of course, he has no resolve. In a single fool’s moment he stripped off his skin before her, wasted the last of his fortitude, but she can’t tell the difference. That particular loss is for him to consider alone: a Jedi betrayal of the self. It only ever takes one second of weakness.

Ventress is foreign to subtleties; Ventress thinks breaking means _breaking_. So he keeps his face steady, and his voice, and she sees nothing amiss.

“Would you like me to take off the mask?” she asks, then. “Let you look into the Force? Borrow the agony of his death?”

His breath slows, each swallow a trial. “Yes,” he says hoarsely and for a moment he is not thinking of what he could do with the Force, what the Force would do with him. Only of the firm-closed door between him and Anakin, of opening it regardless of what he’ll find. Longing cuts a hole in his heart. Let her pride give him this.

Oh, the worst thing of all is that he _believes_. For he cannot feel the alternative.

“No.” She shakes her head. “He’s dead and you must to live with the knowledge and the uncertainty. Get used to it.” A snarl hangs on her lips. “False Jedi.”

His throat aches, longs for silence, but he cannot stop the sound that tears its way out of him. He deserves the pain, the solitude. The uncertainty, yes, the designation of _false Jedi_ , if his padawan is dead.

The floor waits below his knees, so near that he can feel the cool of the stone. Only the chains keep him upright against every instinct in his body.

Above him, he sees Ventress’s feet in retreat. “Wear his death,” she hisses, “for it is yours,” and she slams the door behind her.

Perhaps she is more proficient at the subtleties of torture than he supposed.

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes, sleeps. Wakes, sleeps. His arm is a contorted agony: he takes it. His throat is bruised past speech: he takes it. The pain is his due, less than his due. He takes and takes and sleeps, back scraping the wall, head lolling on his shoulders. 

What is intact in him is bound together by the haze of pain, and the black-smoke uncertainty of the Sith-mask clouding his throughts. Perhaps he will die in the belly of Citadel Ventress. Will that be his due? Will that make reparation for Anakin’s death, for the rest of the padawans’, countless clone troopers? What good is he here as the sole survivor of Jabiim?

_That is weakness,_ and he knows it, but the Force keeps its distance and weakness is a comfort here. Strength is so lonely, takes so very much work.

Ventress finds him hanging slumped against the wall. She reaches out, tips up his head. It falls when she lets it go. He may be overdue for pain, but he owes _her_ nothing. Not his attention, not his reaction, not his kriffing posture. “This is disappointing,” she says.

Another droid stands at the door with another bowl and cup. He remembers the tastes, bland, bitter, oily. Everything in this place is poison. She brings the bowl to him and his hands are bound too high for him to take it, but when she raises it toward his lips, he knocks his skull into it and sends it shattering to the floor.

She says again: “This is disappointing. I didn’t think you’d break so easily.”

He speaks, ragged, agonizing. “You’re poisoning me.”

She sits back on her heels. “Not this time.”

A look of mixed intention passes over her face, lands on a decisive snarl. Reaching before her, she kneels and pinches a bite of food from the floor. Her hand braces against his face, thumb digging hard into a bruise beneath his chin, and he groans, he cannot help it, and her fingers slip between his lips. She claps her palm over his mouth and he swallows, reluctantly.

It tastes like nothing. Nothing bitter, nothing foul, nothing at all. His body clenches around just that little bite, longing for nutrition, for _life_. In spite of everything.

If Anakin _is_ dead—and all the pain in his body recedes next to that one, and the world tells him nothing to contradict it; the universe feels vast and empty and for the first time, careless of him—then he owes it to him not to die here. Not like this, curled up and waiting. If the killing blow comes here, it will come at his courting.

“You were useless with it, Kenobi,” she says. All you did was weep for your padawan while you slept. This tells me nothing but of your weakness. It tells me nothing new.”

She turns her back and he swallows, running his tongue over his teeth, remembering the bitter aftertaste, tries to characterize it. He will choose his poisons, learn them, one day at a time. Grief is only the first. If only he had more experience with the tastes—

She casts a glance over her shoulder before she opens the door. “It was muratine,” she says, “You were susceptible, but you made it too easy. Eat your food in peace from now on. When you beg for your life, it won’t be a drug that pushes you to do it.”

She leaves and he feels a curious relief—he swallows with it, feels the chain-ring of bruises reprimand him. Muratine, a chemical goad to madness. Sometimes, yes, to suicide. It wasn’t _him_ , then. Not really. Whatever happens, he won’t lose what little grasp on himself he has left; that he won’t destroy himself, not even in Anakin’s memory.

His padawan’s name cuts in him, cuts through the relief. The pain is still raw, the guilt slicing. _She lies,_ his thoughts nag, _but so do you._

He cannot trust himself. Not in the Sith dungeon, not so far from the Force, not so far from himself and the rest of the Order. Not when he is so sure that none are watching: Anakin, alive or dead, cannot reach him here. Alive or dead.

 

 

 

 

 

In the shadow, he blinks, adjusts, waits for the next thing. 

“Get up,” she says. When he is slow to move, she kicks his foot, her booted toe colliding with his, and he realizes with distant interest that he might have broken a toe. So many pains he hasn’t evaluated yet. This one blares, fresh and fascinating, through his foot, flaming up his leg, and he stares up and wonders what she can tell that he doesn’t know yet. His knowledge of himself, his own body, is imperfect; hers might be better, even if she can’t crack into his mind. She’s still walking in the Force, albeit on its dim far side. Can see the cracks, the pains. He can shut his mouth as tight as he likes, but he can’t keep the pain out of his body, not without help.

“Where are the Republic’s foundries?” she asks him. “Where do they make their weapons?”

And he does laugh, then, the sound strange and loud in his ears as though she’s chosen a new poison, a new hallucinogen. If Anakin is dead, if the padawans are dead on Jabiim, what sort of leverage does she think she has with him?

“Why would I tell you?” he asks, and in answer she kicks him again, this time in the kneecap. He braces himself against the wall with a grunt as red heat flares through the whole of his leg, searing marrow-deep. Real pain, but ordinary pain—comically far from new. Worse has been done to him on the battlefield ten times over; worse was done him even on Jabiim. A grin catches on his face, angry and defiant.

She rests her heel on his throbbing knee lightly, almost intimately, and then she brings her foot down, hard, against the wall. He hears the crunch of bone and the ordinary becomes spectacular.

He screams, and—Force help him, the smoke lifts in his head. For a moment he is focused, feels the bone splinter under the skin and through it, feels the Force pull in and try to knit him together, only begging for direction, for his patience. For time he does not have.

And he feels her too, her dark unfocused energy honing in as he screams, colored with something like joy.

No pain stays blinding. Endurance is a curse, now. Gasping, the pain recedes to merely harrowing, and his control slips out of him once more, to the far reaches of his mind. Waiting to save him or be saved, a lovely thing, of course, but useless now. He feels the bone shard threatening to break skin, the skin itself feeling leaf-thin beneath his prison-ragged trousers.

And the echo of her, too. A bolt of pleasure that is not, cannot be his own.

He looks up at her, furious, chest heaving, remembering how many other parts of him hurt—the burn of his shoulder, the tearing muscles in his arms, and Force save the wreck of his heart—and her toe lingers, light, on his thigh.

Better not to touch the Force at all, if it comes with her fingerprint.

“Don’t let the young ape have died for nothing,” she says, sliding her foot over the bone-shards beneath his knee, and he gasps, and there’s clarity again, and behind the cloud in his thoughts he finds, first and foremost, an infinite supply of fury. He thinks, for a moment, that his padawan has willed it to him—his worst and (he can admit it, in Sith-fogged silence, if Anakin is dead and won’t learn anything by it) sometimes his best. More than rage: that whole, raw-beating undisciplined heart of his.

Now he drives his knee up under Ventress’s foot, kicks his other leg out as far as he can make it, knocking a thigh between hers, and it’s not enough for what he’d like—he’d like to see her sprawling, to knock her bone-white skull against the cell floor—but her balance falters and for a moment she is graceless and her mouth is open and that is enough. She doesn’t fall, she lands with her feet on the floor with Force-graced agility, but he’s surprised her.

One shard of bone splits through skin, and the pain is too agonizing for him to enjoy the moment. He misses the look on her face, can’t see a thing—everything blazes blind-white for a moment, blotting out even her.

Then he is himself again, and the mask presses to his temples all the harder, the Sith-cloud binding him together as his skin and bones may yet fail to do. Every breath comes ragged, shallow, strangled like the chain’s still wrapped around his throat. How precarious his body is becoming. He wonders whether it is stronger than his mind. Which will prevail. If anything will.

Ventress blinks, the balance on her feet not seeming to have reached her thoughts. “You’re a fool,” she says. 

He nods. It hurts.

“Where does the Republic build its weapons?” she asks again, words firing out of her mouth blaster-quick, and before he can open his mouth not to answer she punches him cleanly between the eyes, knocks him into the black.

 

 

 

 

 

When he comes to, he stretches, pushing at the boundaries of today’s pain, and finds his bloodied trouser leg cut away to reveal a bacta wrap around his broken knee. Interesting. He tries to move his leg and finds the result merely agonizing, rather than blinding. Beneath the bacta, his skin is whole, though he feels the bones moving with a certain worrying looseness. Something tethers the bone-shards together, something that makes his blood feel sluggish, tainted. He pushes his heel into the floor, sending pain sparking up the kneecap, testing—whatever-it-is, and the cap presses on his head, and he thinks, _more dark-side work_. The bones scrape together in his knee, fractured, fractious, and if he sinks down into sensation—pain but most of all _awareness_ —he can feel something sparking under the skin, something that reminds him very much of Force lightning.

He presses harder, so hard that his vision swims, and pain-blind and intent his thoughts turn, finally, Force-warm.

_Now_.  

Now, alone in the cell, he allows himself, focusing on the pain and nothing but the pain, to pull the dark-side energy back into the right side of the Force. He grits his teeth, closes his eyes, and gives himself over. Knits himself back together, in very small pieces, and by so doing, helps knit the universe together.

Balance flows through him; he is, even in this darkness, capable of communing with the bright. The Force is with him even here. Even if it can’t reach him.

It forgives.

Only a little. Only some. Just enough warm, healing energy to sink the bone where it’s meant to be, to seal its fractures beneath the skin. Warmth sinks into the heat, transfiguring the pain to something like ecstasy.

Mainly, it _works_. He loses an hour to the contemplation of bone and ligament, an hour that goes by faster than any since he landed in the cell.

It works, of course, because most of the work has been done for him. He could not have sewn himself shut, he thinks. Best not to think about that. Best to keep favoring one leg, when tested—best not to give her any ground. For now he exhales, relaxes his leg, and the pain eases just enough to let the dark cloud sink back into his head.

The smoke has learned the shape of his thoughts. It’s grown clever, now. Sith work always is. It shadows just the right distracting memories. Not the bad ones. The pleasant ones—a thousand times worse. Behind his unfocused eyes, he spars with Anakin, fights with him, feels his padawan’s shoulders press against his back, their feet moving in steady sync. A quiet hour in the temple, the sound of padawans practicing in a nearby room. Blood streams from the walls: a false memory of a true thing. Behind his back, his hands clench, empty, wanting a lightsaber, wanting some kind of release.

The test arrives a few hours later. Ventress opens the door, unaccompanied.

“No feast today?” His mouth is desert-dry, tongue dry and tasting of rust. He would break at least three oaths for a cup of water. “And I was starting to enjoy Rattataki cuisine.”

She crosses her arms, doesn’t reply.

“Where are the Republic’s medical facilities?” she asks, and he snorts.

“You seem to have functioning medical facilities here. Thank you, by the way, for your tender care.”

He moves his leg, unleashing another bolt of pain under his skin, under the wrap, and watches her. She blinks coolly. “You’re going to stay breakable for a long time, Kenobi.”

Of course. Repair your toys.

“Now. The medical facilities. Where do you take your wounded?”

“Away,” he says, “from you.”

She’s got a knife today. No two days are alike.

As she comes closer, he can see himself reflected in it: a black blot on its shining metal. The only parts of himself he can recognize are his eyes and the unkempt line of his beard. The rest is hidden, obscured by the mask. True out and in: the only parts of himself he can reach now are his ragged edges.

She runs the fingers of the hand that is not holding the knife over the edge of his masked cheek, lightly, so lightly that he can hardly feel them on the other side. Her nails rest along the rim of one eye-hole, tracing gently over the skin beneath. How thin his skin feels, now, how tightly stretched over the bones of his skull. The Rattataki diet doesn’t favor him. Nor does dining with ghosts.

“Have you wept?” she asks, sounding pleased, and he smiles, sees how very cold the smile is in the reflection of the raised blade.

“Only for your soul.”

She slaps him, a familiar greeting. He barely winces as his teeth bite into his lips, opening an old cut. There is a certain pleasure in knowing her habits, what will make her angry. A known enemy. Her palm is open and the slap rings clear but her fingers shake a little.

Rage, like any of the soul’s instruments, can be played. He can’t move, but he can move _her_.

She pulls back, her hand snaking around the back of his head. Her fingers stroke the back of his neck, beneath the mask, beneath his hair. Now they are steady, and very cool against his feverish skin.

The tip of the blade slides down his mask-protected cheek to the hollow of his throat, then lower. The neckline of his shirt tears like wet paper the moment the blade touches it. She draws a clear line from throat to chest with nothing in her way.

He is breathing shallow and ragged, which somehow brings the rawness of his throat into full color: pain like a scrape rather than a press. He can feel her breath, too, close enough to brush cool air onto his lips. It smells oddly sweet, oddly familiar in its sweetness. Another new poison to catalogue. Later. She presses the tip of the knife against the bone of his sternum, another place where the skin is thin. He envisions her cutting him open, gutting him like a fish—but that wouldn’t be reparable. He feels a prick, a very small cut and a steady pulse of heat blossoming outward, like a ripple in the stream. A perfect and exact starburst of pain.

When she raises the knife, the point is capped in red. She leans in against him—on his strong side, he notes. “Where do you take your wounded?”

“Oh,” he breathes, “anywhere that’ll have them. Everyone’s taking in wounded Jedi these days. You’re one of many, Ventress.”

Her eyes are so terribly bright in the gloom of the cell.

She cuts a line up his chest, drawing the knife up slow and steady with the same delicate pressure. It hardly hurts where the metal touches him; it is when she draws the knife back that the pain begins. A wire of pure heat burns against his skin, splitting it open. By the time the tip of the knife reaches his throat he longs for an honest stab wound.

Her fingers are in his hair, pulling his head back as she speaks. The same words, steady, steady:

“Where do you take your wounded?”

“Wherever they think they want to go.” His throat bobs against the tip of the knife. He glances down. The long cut bleeds freely, if shallowly, as he speaks, blood staining his tunic. “Myself, I requested a Sith nursemaid. I hardly know why they gave me to you. They must have been shortchanged.”

She leans in. “We burned the dead padawans,” she whispers. “The grave the droids dug was not large enough to hold all the bodies. No one will ever find your friend. Not even in the precious Force.”

He moves. Lashes, strikes his head forward and hears something crack. The hot wire of pain on his chest sears, but Force save him it’s worth it to see her stagger back, holding her face in her hands, hissing.

No. Laughing.

When she lifts her face, blood stains her nose and lips, tinted deep violet in the cell’s long grey shadows and dramatic in the chalk-white of her face, but her eyes are bright as her blade. “There you are,” she murmurs, swiping at her face and bloodying her knuckles. The blood only smudges, up her cheek and her long bare temple, mingling with her tattoos. She wipes the blade on her thigh, against dark fabric that swallows the blood. Fabric so tight and mobile he swears he can see the muscles tensing beneath. “There’s my false Jedi prize.”

Reaching up, her fingers lace through one of the chains wrapped around the pipes overhead, pull on his arm. His strong side, still. She comes back, presses her nose against his through the mask, heedless of whether or not it might be broken. Her face fills his vision, close enough to blot out the ghosts and the guilt. For a moment he cannot see her features, only light and shadow and sharp edges.

Of the views in the cell, this is the unfortunate best of them. When she’s in the room, she’s all he can see—not the battlefield and not the dead. There is a peculiar blessing in that. Asajj Ventress, and her knife, most unlikely of saviours.

He hears, rather than sees, her sheath the knife. She lays a hand along his collarbone and her sharp nails press against the skin. “I’ve dreamed of this since Ord Cestus,” she says.

Her breath is in his mouth again and—now he recalls, yes, a minor mission, but that’s what the scent reminds him of. Some product of Dathomirian chemistry or habit, of course, but it recalls the taste of X’Ting honey to the back of his tongue. Honey made in the factory hives of Ord Cestus, amidst war and death: sweetness engendered in metal and bloodshed.

“We danced well on Cestus,” she says, and he raises a brow, the motion stretching bruised skin. 

“Give me my lightsaber,” he says, “and we can dance again.”

“I bested you there, too.” She braces her elbow on his shoulder, beside his raised arm. Lifts a finger to trace the edge of his face. Her nail scratches along the leathery exterior of the mask, a small sound amplified a thousandfold in his ears. “Remember?”

“I remember you swimming off in a fit of panic after losing a duel,” he says, and the hand on his collarbone scratches down, hard. Three new knives, three new wounds, scoring through bruised burned skin. The world narrows in scope yet again, down to the echo of Ventress’s hand. Her nails _twist_ and his vision shades into abstracts, into white and red.

“I had you in the shadows,” she whispers, “first. Do you remember?”

Her lips curl into a smile. This is a game she likes. His head hurts, and the Sith mask shakes up a memory of a X’Ting ball, of him slipping easily into a modified Alderaanian reel. A light memory. He hated, _hates_ diplomatic missions, but he thinks he may have been happy there, then. Jedi learn to dance young. This, unlike negotiations and paperwork, was easy. He cannot remember who danced with him. Ventress’s face blots out all others. Not with her—madness, of course. But the Sith shadow in his head plays with his thoughts, licks delicately into his fractured memories, filling them with lies.

Asajj Ventress leans against him now, an arm wrapped around him as though they have danced indeed, and his body remembers the steps. The truth is something like the lie, though she never stepped onto the dance floor. Her presence was teasing at the edges of his consciousness all mission, making room for the smoke.

He can’t focus. That’s the point. He blinks through false memories and true and looks at her now, where she has his body and his mind in her hands at last. 

“You couldn’t take me in a match,” he says, and she pulls back. He feels the absence of her body, his own shifting into solitary equilibrium and reminding him of just how many uneven aches and pains are holding it together.

She draws her hand up to her face, where her own blood has dried on her cheek and above her mouth, running her fingertips over her lower lip as she thinks. His blood mixes with hers on her lips.

“I’ll take what’s left of you now,” she says, “but only when you beg me. And, Kenobi, you will.” 

As she speaks, her lips part and he sees her tongue move, flick against her nails and the blood caught beneath them, and something in him stirs—sharp, ugly, hungry, but for all that it breaks through the fog.

Force save him, he thinks, knowing it won’t here, wondering what will.

 

 

 

 

 

That night, the smoke in his thoughts seeking out the worst in him, he does dream of Ord Cestus. Even clouded, he has enough consciousness left to wonder if he’s stumbled into her dream, an echo of something _hers_ —or if he alone is to blame for this, for the resurrection of a long-dead near-failed mission.

He does not dream of fear, nor of the fight, not of Kit Fisto sending the dock crashing out from beneath his and Ventress’s feet, sending them both into the Cestian sea, not of ink and blood and salt in his mouth. Only of the X’Ting ball and this time he can make out her shadow at his back, in the corners of the room. In the dream, his feet move, he turns, his shadow stretches before him and there she is. Standing opposite him, once more in the centre of the X’Ting celebration hall, mirroring the way he moves. The reel in his feet, his lightsaber in his hands. Here she slides her thigh between his while her lightsabers draw down on either side of his head, and the X’Ting stand in a circle and watch them dance. Until they fade into shadow and absence, until only he and Ventress are left.

Then she turns and runs and he feels the echo of her shape as something missing from his body.

But even so he can make out the flicker of her cape in the shadows, the memory false but vivid of watching her go, the long surprisingly graceful line of her back running between narrow high-roofed X’Ting-built buildings. He should have known the shape of her, sooner. Should have understood. If he’d known, he could have found her, fought her, saved Force only knows how many of his friends—

He jerks awake, mouth dry, the hoarse sound of his breath and the faint rattle of his wrist-chains the only sounds in the cell. All Rattatak might easily die outside his cell window without his knowledge. And he’d remain here, at her mercy. 

Her scratches on his collarbone itch and burn and he thinks, this, he he’s earned. This exact pain, by her hands. He cannot touch them, can’t ease any part of the feeling, and perhaps he doesn’t deserve to. Closing his eyes, he leans into how much it hurts, lets everything else fade from him. Like this, he does not have to speak the names of the dead. Any of the dead.

 

 

 

 

 

Next morning his head is thick, foggier and foggier. A droid comes, feeds him, and he conserves his resistance and takes it. Untouched, again. The cut on his chest has already scabbed over. He does not count it as healing. Not knowing today will bring something else.

Despite himself, he awaits it. Alone, his head is crowded and aching and his body hangs hard on his chains, doubly heavy with the weight of being alive among the dead.

She opens the door, lets in a bit of warped light from the hall outside, and he feels himself shift, feels his body change with her in the room. He’s stronger, or pretending to be, with her here. Heels anchored on the floor, shoulders braced—he tenses up, sending bright painful flashes through muscles he let go slack in the shadow. But that’s the reward of the punishment, perhaps: it keeps him from getting complacent in his unhappiness. He thinks more clearly, and the despair is further off. There’s simply no room for despair when a Nightsister with a knife is carving you up for dinner.

And the appetite in her eyes is tremendous.

“What would you even do with my information?” he asks wearily as she questions him, tossing the hilt of her knife idly hand to hand. “Slaughter and blast, slaughter and blast. Give me a reason, Ventress.”

“I don’t have to,” she hisses, and he says, “No. It doesn’t matter, does it? You won’t get what you want on the battlefield.” He looks her over, tip to toe. The tight leather that clings to her long body, the twin curved lightsabers at her hips that she has yet to draw, the pale drawn furious face. She touches her knife to the top of his cut, where the pulse jumps at the base of his throat, and his thoughts hone to where the cool sharp tip presses against skin. Clearing enough that he can feel her energy, dark and skittish in the room but hugely powerful, brushing against the edges of his consciousness. The Force, in the back of his mind, rises near the surface and she, to his somewhat surprise, flinches back.

If he can feel her, even through the mask’s occlusion, that means she can feel him twice as clearly.

“You won’t get what you want,” he says, “anywhere.”

So powerful, so wasteful, so unlucky. Her energy is scattered but her will is cleaner, better-directed than it has a right to be. Meditative in its monomania, almost Jedi in its focus were its intents not so corrupted: she didn’t have to be _this_ , he thinks. Closing his eyes, slowly—for it is very difficult to be compassionate when he’s looking at her—he considers a Ventress saved by the temple, all that energy directed into the light.

The Sith smoke twists his thoughts, offers up a vision of padawans training, and there is the blood again, and his vast sea of culpability. _I am not to blame for Ventress,_ he thinks, heart-fighting, just as her palm cracks against his cheek. He opens his eyes, blinks.

“Thank you,” he says.

A goad, of course, but Force save him, he happens to mean it.

Her hand, like her thoughts, flinches. Goes to her belt, not to the knife sheath but to the hilt of one of her lightsabers. Its touch seems to calm her. She runs her thumb over the surface, slow, considering, and smiles broad and chilly once more. Almost perfect in her self-collection. _Almost_.

“What’s that, Kenobi?”

“You brought me out of a rather unpleasant reverie.” He leans back as far as he can in his chains, until his shoulders brush the wall. The battle-burns on his back are nearly healed. The medical cures of Citadel Ventress’s dungeon: time and damp air. Briefly, he laughs, and her eyes narrow with incomprehension.

“Focus,” she snaps and he shakes his head, rattling his jarred thoughts in his aching skull.

“You’ll long for Force protection when I do,” he says quietly.

Swift as a whip she pulls her knife back up, pressing the blade to the ball of his throat. He feels his breath grow shallow. Her body presses flush to his, her palm braced to the wall at his back, and he arches his throat, pushing against the blade. Until he feels it draw blood. This is the only way he can think straight.

Force save him, the clarity is addictive.

“What’s this?” she asks again, her whisper thrumming through him, through his rotting robes where her body meets his, through the tip of the blade scratching at his skin.

First she poisoned his thoughts, then his body, now—her hips scrape against his, the knife against throat—she’s poisoning the reserves of his will. The dead are not marching in his head, now, and the temple is far-distant. Here in the cell the world is immediate, painful. There is no greater purpose, nothing beyond the shape of him. Nothing but his body in the chains and Ventress teasing at his limbs and his thoughts and the simple focus provided by the knife, the hit, the _hurt_.  He feels his blood pounding in his temples, heart loud as a drum and preposterously vital given how weak his body is growing. In his chest, throat, the hungry coil of his stomach, drawing him up taut between his legs.

Desire, like a sprung trap.

He doesn’t know what she feels first. Mind or body. But he watches her dark lips stretch into a smile and, stars, he wants to see blood in her teeth—hers or his, he’s not sure. She slides a foot up the side of the wall, leaning in with her thigh braced against the outside of his own. The posture rings an odd chord of familiarity:her hand snakes beneath his mask, holds up his chin, her nails digging in against his mouth. “How did you sleep last night?” she asks, taunting, and he snarls into her hand.

“I hardly think that’s information the Separatists need.”

She draws up the knife, peels the mask up just to his nose—he feels the pressure double at his temples, close to suffocating. Everything is suffocating. In his veins he feels a kind of sick, flammable heat coursing in his blood; his very skin feeling as though it’s drawn too tight. When the blade sinks into the soft skin beneath his ear he gasps with strange, focused relief.

Blood trickles into his beard and down his neck. Her fingers spoil the trail, scratching a long steady trail along the hypersensitive skin just below the cut. She reaches the back of his neck, grabs a fistful of hair at the base of his neck.

“As long as you’re here,” she says, and her hips slide against him and he can’t help the way his spine arches, pushes his own up to meet hers—this is a kind of pain too, wretched and _clear_ in what it wants, what it is—“your dreams are my property. You’re mine now. I _know_ you.” She yanks his hair, rucks her hips against his, and the sound he makes is hardly human. _Rancorous_ , for her Dathomirian benefit—he laughs, until she presses her thumbnail against the cut and the laugh dies choking in his throat. “You showed your hand and your heart the first time we fought.”

_Let her see it herself, then._

He says, “Either cut me to ribbons or leave.”

She slides the knife back into her belt and lets her hand idle lightly over his hip. His eyes flutter shut and she flicks, hard, at the divot of his hipbone, the hunger-taut stretch of skin. It shouldn’t hurt, shouldn’t factor against scorch marks and strains and fresh cuts, but somehow the brief spark of her nails against thin tunic and thin skin obliterate all the rest. If only for a second. “Look me in the eye,” she says. “Beg.”

“You’re not that good, Ventress,” he says.

Her hand snatches back. He wishes he didn’t regret it—wishes _devoutly_ he didn’t twitch toward its absence. The slap, when it cracks against his cheek, is perfunctory, imperfect in its landing. Her hand lingers on his cheek, fingers fluttering over the bared edge of his face in almost compulsive strokes before she takes it away from him. She comes to rest on her belt, thumbing over the arsenal of weapons there. Her hands anchor on the saber hilts on her hips. A pretty, threatening picture. He coughs, blinks, infuriated by how vividly it lingers behind his eyes.

“Planning to use them,” he asks hoarsely, “or no?”

“This is hardly a battle.” She looks him over. “You will, you know. When Dooku comes, I’ll be showing you off on your knees.”

“Is Dooku coming?” he asks, and he sees tension and fear tighten over her like a carapace.

“You’re not listening,” she hisses, though of course, he is, with every raw bit of him. Her voice echoes through the stone, through his skin. “I’ll have you on display. The harems of the Hutt will be nothing to the humiliation I can put you through.”

Laughter hurts a great deal. The cut beneath his ear bleeds freely. “Dream of it,” he says, “and you can send me those dreams—” and he feels he’s biting his tongue as he speaks, he knows how vividly they will come if she does; he still feels her thigh sliding between his, the echo of her red lightsabers in the room, though she’s never lit them once in the cell. “But I’ll know they’re yours. Your lies.”

“Then I’ll meet you in yours.”

Though she is standing apart from him now, he swears he can still feel her pulse. It plays havoc with his own.

Then she yanks his mask back down over his mouth and chin, fingers glancing scalded off his skin, and she leaves, slamming the door behind her. Alone, bleeding, and still in the same rigid, hateful agony, he contemplates the ruin of his teachings, of his compassion. _Invite your enemy into your heart_ —and, he thinks, render your own heart a wasteland, kill them from within you.

There is so little left in him. Let her open him up: he’ll drag her through his own ruined landscape, destroy her in the ugly hollows of his soul, leave her for the dead to devour before he joins them himself.

 

 

 

 

 

Force save him from himself, he dreams. Dreams of peeling the leather back from her skin, of finding bruises beneath that echo his exactly, and rage and the relics of compassion war with him: nausea swells with him at the offer of compassion and he wakes, cursing and skin-soaked.

The nausea was hers. He figures that out, swallowing, soon enough. The rage, he can’t pinpoint. Nevertheless, she comes in the next day with her eyes bright, looking all too well rested. Beneath her mask of satisfaction, he feels her jumpy, restless energy, but the mask does not crack. She crosses the cell in long steps to where he hangs in the chains, bending at the knees to look at him.

He does not wish to look at her. But his blood, slow and sluggish, just a moment before, wakes, reminds him of everything that hurts and just how much doesn’t—not yet. The knowledge, the promise, is a poisonous intoxicant.

The shared knowledge. She knows too much.

She crouches, reaching down to push his chin up with two fingers. She peels up the mask, again, carefully, rolling it just up to the eyes and not disturbing its hold on his head. Still, the air feels different without the slick black cloth over his mouth, tastes different given an inch of freedom. The pressure of her fingers is a level, near-sweet pain, twice as vivid.

“I can taste it. I can touch your thoughts.” She runs her fingers down the edge of his jaw, nails scratching through his beard. Her fingers shiver, whether with fear or something else he couldn’t say. As if in proof, he feels her presence in his mind, just as unsteady, pushing at the edges. Another set of fingertips, printing against the soft tissues of his consciousness. He shudders. It is not repulsion that moves him.

There is no part of him that doesn’t offer itself up to her.

“I know what you want. But I want you to say it aloud.”

“Do your worst,” he growls, and she pulls his hair and the chain at the same time. _Sith hells_ —

“That’s not good enough.” Her mouth is beneath the bare edge of his ear; he can feel her breath brushing cool against the raw cut skin there. “Your thoughts are worthless. Use your words.”

Agony, anguish, desire, braided in him. A mock of his principles, braided into him first: he wants them cut, now.

He feels her touch focusing him, but his thoughts can still move on their own. Not everything is hers. His pain will not be her trophy and, Sith hells, certainly not Dooku’s. It belongs to him even now.

He says: “Show me what you did on Jabiim.”

He watches her suck back a surprised breath. As long as he can surprise her, he’s not wholly lost. She’s never been half so surefooted as she thinks. He knows this, is practiced in the knowledge. Perhaps she’s right about what is revealed in battle, perhaps she does know his heart. Even so, she does not know what he must carry, surviving, from the bloody field. His conscience, he thinks, is not for her palate.

She shakes her head, slowly, now, not understanding. “An impersonal death is not for you, Kenobi.”

He says, again: “Show me. Between you and this blasted mask, you ought to be able to work out a way. I don’t care if you cut the memory out of me after. I have to see it.”

She tilts her head, weighing potential gratification against potential pain. The pain wins. The pain always wins. “All right,” she says at length, and her fingers slip beneath the tight leather of the mask and roll it up further, baring his face and the metalwork beneath the leather. The air is cool and dank on his skin, turning the sweat on his forehead instantly cold, freezing the metal that grips his skull. She presses her fingers to his temple, the Sith-worked metal there, and he feels energy course over her fingers and into the maskwork, a lightning-bright spark passing over the metal and sinking into his skin.

The images are vivid and new: the padawan regiment slaughtered in a hail of blaster-fire, countless clones falling to droids, red lightsabers swinging in his hand, the fierce physical focus of moving on the battlefield. Her motion, her memories, he realizes, as he looks down at his own body lying in the muck. In his head, he looks away, feeling her triumphant desire pull at his. That’s not why he’s here. Sith hells, it’s not.

Desperately, he combs through his thoughts for even a glimpse of Anakin, alive or dead.

He finds nothing. Amidst the fallen, all through the blast-scorched earth, his vision— _Ventress’s_ vision—gives him nothing.

This aches worst of all—the grief, the rage that swells to bursting in his heart, all that and still no anchor. Anakin is dead, must be dead, and the _must_ is worst of all. Every time he thinks of his padawan, he must kill him again in his thoughts. Must slaughter him with his own lack of knowledge and leave him behind.

A sharp slap on his cheek: he comes to behind his own tight-closed eyes, feels the muscles in his face ache with grimacing. His face is wet, hair soaked with sweat, eyes aching. With effort, he forces them open and sees Ventress, feels her holding his head up.

“Everything you hoped?” she asks, mouth twisted in contempt.

She looks almost tired, though nothing to what he feels.  Speech is an almighty trial: “Where _is_ he—”

“I told you.” She shifts uncomfortably on her feet, though she does not move back. “I didn’t have the pleasure of killing the young ape personally. It’s not important. He’s not important and,” she says, stroking his beard almost thoughtlessly, “neither are you.”

Near enough to bite. He turns his head and, for a brief relieving moment, sinks his teeth against skin, bone.

He doesn’t break skin, but she hisses and grips him by the throat. “How badly do you want to be hurt?” she snarls, and he gives her another level look, feeling his breath jump under her hand and, Force take it, his pulse with it.

“Worse than you’re capable of.”

His mouth tastes like her skin, which tastes like his blood. No new taste. No seismic shift. He’d hoped grief would kill his desire, would shame his body quiet, but her fingers wrap around her throat and both the Force and his body stir violently awake. Needing purpose—needing _use_.

She lifts a hand, tugs one of the chains loose with a flick and a glance, and one of his arms goes into relieving slack. His shoulder gives a horrible pop and he falls, gasping, to his knees, his other arm still pulled taut above his head. She looks down over him and sweeps up a boot to kick him in the face. His nose cracks with pain, his skull knocks against the wall, and nothing is such a blessing as the bright nothing in his head. When he blinks the white light out of his eyes she is bending again, running a finger over the bridge of his nose. Not broken. “I owed you that,” she says, almost sweetly, and he tries to laugh. The sound produced is hideous, humorless. The galaxy owes him worse.

He rolls back. “Is this—” His vision swims, breath racking in his throat. “Is this your idea of a fight?”

“You want a fight?” she asks. “Like this?”

He says, “Yes.”

“How badly?”

He takes too long to reply, and she kicks him in the knee. Not the broken one. The contact is bracing, balancing. Pain weighs him in scales, holds him in steady searing hands. He coughs, blood on his tongue.

He says, “Please.”

The sound of her lightsabers unsheathing is clear as a song. The Force hums in the back of his mind, bright against the oncoming pain. His fingers twitch, longing for his own hilt.

They sing of life and, with it, death. The ultimate clarity, in death. He thinks of Qui-Gon, kneeling before the Sith. Kneeling now, he bends his head and listens to them sear downward. The red light touches his shoulders, burning through tunic down to skin, and his head is so full of bright light that for a moment he does not feel any pain at all.

_Force take me_ —he tenders himself up—the last of his line, an abandoned link now—

The red light disappears. He hears a clatter. She throws both hilts away in disgust. “This is not a fight,” she hisses. “I’m not making things so easy for you.”

Now, it hurts. His vision swims with the afterecho of the red light and the onslaught of pain. He hears her, though distantly, speaking somewhere from the outer edges of his consciousness. “Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re a blasted fool” she is saying, “I _told_ you the Force wouldn’t save you,” and her voice is sharp but strangely without venom, without triumph. Then he falls, and the darkness catches him, beyond the Sith-smoke, even beyond her.

 

 

 

 

 

That night, the Sith-mask’s false thoughts take to her specter like a field on fire. She tracks his best memories and his worst: dances with him, swims and spars, scythes through the Jabiim fields. The hand holding the red lightsaber that cuts Qui-Gon down warps from red to white. He mourns, and a sharp-nailed hand wrenches his face up skyward, strokes his throat. Nothing is sacred, nothing is left.

He wakes with bacta on his shoulders and the mask tight as ever over his mouth.

She does not come to him that day.

Nor the day after.

The image of her fades on the second night, while he sleeps, and the third finds her gone entirely.

The part of his mind that calls to the Force aches with unuse. Each new morning he wakes to a pale grey and uncaring universe. His thoughts, sleeping, waking, rattle with her absence, as vivid a non-presence as his litany of the dead. Without anyone else to blame, the mental smoke curls around him, choking close, contaminating a life he used to think well-lived. Here are his dead, here is the world out of reach, and here he is, unable to save a single part of it.

If he hated the sight of her in the shadows, he hates the guilty solitude all the more.

When at last the door opens to reveal footsteps rather than droid-wheels he snaps into attention so hard that he thinks briefly he could pull the chains from the ceiling. They rattle, hard, against the stark bone promontories of his wrists. The cuts and blisters there have begun to scab over.

His wounds feel old. _He_ feels old. But his shoulders burn, the cuts on his chest and neck sear, and the weakness washes off him in her presence. And, _Force save him_ , the closer she comes, the more vividly he can feel the Force holding fast in the back of his mind. Patient, steady, just out of his grasp.

_Invite your enemy into your heart, lest you go mad without company._ No one ever taught him that credo—he supposes it is crueler than it is compassionate. To the both of them.

Closing the door, she leans against it, not immediately coming closer, and looks him over. His wounds, his face, the rattle of the chains in the air. His heels dig into the floor, arms pulling on his chains, and every agony in his body is revivified. And within the pain, reawakened in her presence, _Obi-Wan Kenobi_ begins to take recognizable shape again.

“Happy to see me?” she asks, and her voice is odd to his ears. Not only from her absence, not only from so long listening to nothing but the sound of his own hard breath: her affect is wrong. Too rattled to carry off her customary smug purr.

“I feared you’d grown bored.” He raises a brow, shrugs and forces his shoulders to count their hurts. Her doing, his deserts. “What’s vexing you, Ventress?”

“Nothing,” she snaps, pushing up from the metal, and he feels her energy shuddering at the back of his mind.

“Did your master snap his fingers and send you running—”

“My master is not your concern.”

“So he did.”

She paces the side of the room, a long restless hooded shadow. “You weren’t ready,” she says, looking at him as though he’s to blame. Which he supposes he is. Even before his principles were left to rot in a Rattataki cell, he was taught humility, not compliance.

“That can’t have pleased him,” he says, and she stops in her tracks. Fixes him with a steady, appraising look, so long and silent that he grows restless beneath it.

At last, she opens her mouth, licks over her dark, dry lower lip. “I told him you were dead.”

Ice fixes his spine against the wall. For a single, cold second, he thinks: _The galaxy has abandoned me, at last._

He waits for defeat to sink in. For the killing blow to strike.

Only he can see she’s not pleased with it. Oh, he can see her trying to look the part—the raised brow, the crooked curl of her mouth—but her plans have, in some way, been spoiled. Even now, perfect despair eludes him. And he can’t despair as long as things are yet going wrong for the Dark Side. This is to be his consolation, limited as it is, even if he is dead in his chains.

“Spoke too soon of my parade,” he says, and she is across the room, on him at once. She does not even give herself time to draw; she does not have to. Her hand sweeps up and his body jerks hard into the air, knocking up up into the wall. His chains twist hard around his wrists, grinding against the bone; he can already feel the braid of bruises they will leave. The air in his throat goes shallow and foul, Force-choked.

“This means I can do as I like with you,” she hisses, “as long as I like, don’t you understand?”

He looks her in the eye and for the first time in days he can feel Force-sensitivity fighting through his clouded thoughts. His mind is tender as a bruise under a thumb, and he offers himself up to its excruciating pressure. The mask tightens at his temples. Blood beats in his head, and with it, power. Not clarity, not yet, and nothing like healing, but power all the same.

“Is this all?”

She drops him, the chains jerking his dislocated shoulder. He cries out and she steps in, toe to toe with him. The lightsabers are back at her hips. She must have returned for them while he was unconscious; he can’t see her sending a droid in for retrieval.

Very deliberately, she unties the cape from her throat and the belt from her hips. Lets it fall to the ground atop the pile of cloth, her lightsaber hilts clattering through the fabric against the damp stone ground. She rests on her heels before him, bent-kneed, and reaches out to shake him by the shoulders. Her hands slip through the burn-holes in his tunic, palms grinding into the yet-raw burns that bookend his neck, and he makes another hoarse, harsh, inarticulate sound. The world warps with pain, narrows in focus. He sees her face, feels her hands, thinks of the Force twisting between them.

“How much do you crave death?” she asks, almost softly.

“It’s in and out of my thoughts,” he says, “it rears an inconvenient head after battles,” and she shakes him again. His eyes close, overwhelmed, washing up on the shore of the pain, and her knees slip between his as she pulls herself closer. She peels up his mask, cups his face in her hands, scratches slowly down each cheek.

All she says is, “No.”

She reaches toward her fallen belt and pulls her knife from its sheath. Holding up his head, she cuts through the cloth with her other hand, knifing along his shoulders and down his chest. The blade skims over him, close enough to set his skin buzzing, his teeth grit, but never landing. It only touches the fabric, which cleaves at a breath. The ragged tunic falls from him in pieces, and the air is a damp relief from the half-rotten cloth. She pulls his head back by the hair and draws the knife over the top of the old scratch, teasing a new line perpendicular to the old one.

“You are a false Jedi who got his friends killed,” she breathes, so near his mouth he can nearly taste her words, “and you won’t be missed.”

He thinks, _Worse_.

She slides in and he stretches in toward her, toward her knife, with terrible ease. _False Jedi_ rings in his head. It sounds like a lie when she says it. He wants her to say it again.

“What did the Order do to you?” he cannot help but ask, and her hand slips, cutting an uneven too-swift slice across the top of his chest. The pain is a shock, not a tease. He hisses into it and her legs tense against his. She wraps a hand around his shoulder, nails sinking into the burn, and her hips cant up against his and his breath catches in his throat.

“You Jedi think everything is about you.”

This wouldn’t be _satisfying_ if he wasn’t Jedi, he wants to say. Making him sink wouldn’t mean so much if he wasn’t trained to rise above.

He can feel a pulse, a heartbeat, vivid under his skin as he bleeds, and he is not quite certain if it is his or hers. Her thighs are tight-corded through their wrap of black leather and he can feel a surprising amount of heat coming off her in the cold room. The only blood in her white, white face is in her lips, darker than usual where her teeth dig in. As she concentrates. As she slides against him, blade and body.

“So what is it about?” he asks, his breath corded short with pain and, Sith take it, _Sith take it—_ not just pain. “Where the Republic builds their weapons and keeps their wounded?”

She laughs, a short burst of sound. Makes a dismissive gesture with the hand holding the knife. Blood flicks onto his cheek. His. “You’re useless for information,” she says with half a shrug. “I’ll get that from your clone trooper.”

Alpha—he’d forgotten—the thought hits him where he’s weak, _weaker_ , and he is so instantly awash in anger that it comes as something of a shock. And something of a relief. It’s not the Force—save him, it’s so far from the Force—but power rises in him, raw in the blood, intoxicating.

In a blink, he twists his wrist and has the chain around her throat. Has the reward of hearing her yelp, her surprise—

It does no good, of course. The Force is already pushing back against his hand, her dark warped grip from her dark warped thoughts, far more powerful than him in his current state. She laughs again, a scraping sound against the metal, looping her fingers through it.

“Almost good,” she says, and she does not pull it off, does not pull back. Only presses in further, until she can wrap her legs around his hips. The tip of her nose presses to his as she yanks the chain again, pulling hard on his arm, his twisted shoulder. Her face is so near to his that she can breathe in and swallow his half-choked cry.

Her eyes are bright, interested.

“Not good enough,” she says, savoring the words, her hipbones grinding down savagely against his and, Sith hells, he wants to kill her, wants to sink into her, wants her to cut him again and stop him wanting anything.

His emotions brim up under his skin, drowning in his head, waiting for her to take them. She can’t take his thoughts, but she can leave her footprint in his consciousness, taste what it’s offering up. All that rage and desire, all that strength pouring into the Dark Side. Strengthening _her_. He cannot pretend that this is a battle of dark and light, now; he sees himself clearly, even as he’d very much like to look away. Here in the cell, the war is between him and Ventress alone. Blows, dreams, and thoughts exchanged like gifts.

_Invite your enemy_ —where, Force, to what end? He cannot retreat, cannot escape, cannot pull out of his own skin, there is no sacred oasis in the back of his mind, no peace. And he is not a good enough man to prefer the company of ghosts to her. To this.

His enemy’s far enough in him. She’s made his body, blood, his thoughts her home. And part of him has been inviting her along all this time: both the trained part and the part that the training couldn’t quite drown out.

Force save him from the way she is studying him, from her hips’ shallow motion against his, from how much she _understands_.

She puts the knife down. So careful and steady it makes hardly a sound. Behind her. Out of his reach—not that he knows what he’d do with it. Put it to her throat, perhaps, demand his freedom, but he can’t imagine her fear. Can hear the echo of her laughter.

That’s not where he’ll find her fear, in any case.

She runs her nails up his throat, sending chills more than pain, until she digs into the cut she made. Her lips hover behind his ear, reading his gooseprickling skin with her breath, and he feels her tongue track the path of the blood, down the side of his throat. She bites his collarbone and he lets out a groan. Pain and pleasure. The pain _is_ pleasure. He can feel her triumphant smile against his skin and for a moment, he thinks he’ll come then and there. Humiliating, though, stars, it’d be something of a relief.

No. His endurance bests him, yet again.

Her fingers keep picking their steady, torturous path downward, along the raw terrain of his bare chest, tracing the cuts she made, skimming through blood-matted cords of pale reddish hair. Perversely, trapped like this—his tunic in scraps on the floor, his knees grinding into the stone—he thinks of meditation, of practice in the pale early hours, wielding his lightsaber and letting the Force wield him. Now the Force is distant and cloudy but something outside of him guides him into place all the same. This too is preparing for battle. He strains into her touch, his skin flaring to angry life under her fingers, and she sinks her nails into the base of the long cut, sending a trickle of blood down his navel and to the edge of his trousers.

He’s not an ascetic, but he never thought—never supposed—

There should be no place for desire in a place this ugly, this forsaken. With so many dead at his back. But her fingers track, so sharp, so light, to the hollow of his hipbone, trail along his belt, and he jerks up against her hand, too-briefly riding against the cupped curve of her palm, and through his trousers the building friction burns and relieves.

She jerks back, and the knife is in her hand again, at the hollow of his throat.

“Stay put,” she hisses, the ice-blue of her eyes almost swallowed up in the black of her pupils. She lays her cheek against his almost tenderly, and he feels the heat coming off her in waves, coursing between the two of them. Her desire, desperate as everything she feels, pushing into his consciousness. His own drinking it in.

What makes him weak makes her powerful, and even if the power is corrupt, it’s so _close_. He turns his face, closing his eyes into the onrush of power and pulse, feels his chin scrape hers, her breath against his jaw.

“Don’t,” he whispers, throat jerking against the blade, “put that down.”

“Giving me orders?”

She rakes the flat of the blade down over his fevered skin, lays it in the hollow of his collarbone, against her own bite-mark. Presses, and he sighs, something like a _yes_ —

Her hand slides between his legs again, where he is drawn up painfully tight and hard, somehow aching worse than the wounds, and the knife slides, careful this time, and her nails clench down against the base of him through his trousers and for a moment there is blessed nothing in his head, only a perfect red line down the core of him.

He _focuses_.

Then she tightens her grip and he lets out another choked cry. He tastes blood, his own, he’s stopped knowing from what cut, but he knows he’s tasting what she tastes as well, his blood on her lips, twice-wet on her tongue, and the image sends him over the edge.

Slowly, she untangles her legs from his, the loose chain from her throat. Stands. Wraps the belt around her hips, the cape around her shoulders.

“Pathetic,” she says.

She looks over her shoulder before she goes, long lashes in a tell-tale flutter, her hands shivering against the handle of the door—he swears he can feel that shiver from across the room. Then her fingers sweep up and the chain wraps around the pipe once more, jerking his wrist and yanking his body up from the floor. No rest for the wicked, as they say.

The door closes, and he hangs there, alone, freezing, aching, soaked. Tired, wretched, and despite all that, relieved. Relief, deep as his aches, sinks into his bones.

This, worst of all. He is sick with how much better he feels.

No time for pity. No room in his head for it. Only a great echo in his thoughts. The inside of his head feels cavernous and clear, the pain-pleasure ghosts banishing the mask’s grip on him. Who knows how long that’ll last—best to use it now.

He closes his eyes. Retreats within. Tries to quiet the echo of sensations coursing through him, to no avail. But he can reach the part of him that wields the Force, that longs for it, and when he presses tentatively on his abilities he finds that corner of his thoughts has gone quiet. No longer the agony of abandonment: the despair has gone from him. Some of the weakness, with it. At a cost.

When he finds he can move again, the sky has gone from grey to black outside the window. Unsteady in the dark, he lifts himself up into standing. His shoulder hurts less badly than it did—he moves it, finds it aches, but from within the socket. Thinks of the clear red moment before he came, then banishes it. The power won’t stay, and he needs to not focus on her _hands_ —and his focus is waning, the smoke pushing in.

With a frustrated groan, he knocks his head against the wall, and the white starburst of pain behind his eyes is nothing, now. If he’s testing his strength, he’s not going to match the wall.

He blinks the lights in his eyes away, stares up at the ceiling, the pipes through which the chains are laced. Thinks, and pulls on the chain, drags his near-healed bad leg beneath him and stretches up. If he keeps pulling, he can almost reach.

His bones feel as though they’re full of water, full of poison-sweet near-languor that he refuses to sink into, but he can fight through the slowness, can reach, can pull—has the strength for it. He is both closer and further to what he was, what he should be.

Can’t think of that. Can’t think. Has to use it. He hits the ceiling, then hits his head against the pipe as hard as he can.

The sound of rushing water almost drowns out his racing blood. He tries again. Again, knocking his head against the pipe until a cut at his temple opens; he slips into unconsciousness with blood in his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

His lashes are stuck together, blood-soaked, in the morning. It takes him a good hour to see clearly, and he is still blinking the rusty echo from his vision when she enters the cell again.

“What have you done to yourself?” she asks, almost amused, and he raises a brow through the bruises.

“Trying to teach you a thing or two.”

And she does laugh, and she follows his lead, then, whether she knows it or not. At the very least, she does not suspect.

For his part—

He is almost content, blinking away the blood day after day. As long as he remains here, this is precisely what he deserves.

 

 

 

 

 

He dreams of touching her, running his hands over the pale skin beneath the dark leather, and his chains tighten his arms behind him, even in his sleep. Dark and light agree: he should know better.

Awake, he uses his time more wisely. Knocks his thoughts from his head with the pipe whenever they veer into corruption. The strength is returning, if slowly, to his arms, and the pipe bears a shallow dent from the strength of his foolishness as well. Everything can be used. Everything can lead back to the light.

He’s trying to get there.

In the meantime, his cuts and bruises heal faster and faster, and if he has to ask for more punishment to keep her from noticing—well, that’s his punishment to bear.

 

 

 

 

 

She cuts shallow slanting lines in the thin skin along his hipbones, tracks the blood where it flows. Peels his stained trousers back where they get in her way. He stares at the lines on her temple, the way they curl dark-violet over the back of her white skull. He finds space in his thoughts to wonder if she’s marked under her clothes, tattooed there as well. If she is making him look like her, now.

She says, “Your clone trooper’s making trouble. At least I have you.”

Then her teeth sink into the flesh of his thigh before the anger can strike up in him, taking first hold, and the rise of dark, curling satisfaction in her is so palpable that he can taste it. Her energy pushes back the Force-mask, and he feels her presence, unclouded. Filling his thoughts, his mouth, even as her own dark mouth slides up the tensed line of his thigh. Her breath cooling the cuts, waiting.

“Please,” he gasps, and her lips open, her mouth takes him in.

Not what he was asking for, he wants to say, wants to say he’d have pleaded clemency for Alpha if he’d had time for proper speech. Not the time, though. He can't pretend—his hips jerk up, hands tugging so hard at the chains that he fears, hopes, briefly, that the pipes overhead will snap and drown the pair of them—not to want. Not to feel. He can’t pull back from it, and the pipes do not break; he is rooted _exactly_ where he is.  Though he does what he can—Sith hells, this is the least fair of fights. Pulls back on the chains as his spine arches, pleasure’s corrupt grip on his spine. Thrusts savagely against her mouth and finds she has no particular need to parry. He feels her coiled smirk, on him, her tense energy, in him.

The Jedi condemn attachment, not sexual concourse. He wonders how this weighs in the temple books and for a moment he nearly laughs, before he feels her mouth slide along him and her nails dig into the cuts on his hips and he does not have the breath for it. Not for laughter, not for words.

If this is a fight, she wins. The battles are rigged in her favor here. When he comes, for a bare black moment behind his eyes he can’t feel a thing—not pain, not ecstasy, only the vastness of the universe beyond his tiny corner, bleak and pleasure-racked. When he blinks back into weak awareness, he can see her tongue moving between her teeth, behind her bright lips, and he relinquishes consciousness freely. No help: she is on both sides of his thoughts.

Stars’ end, how swiftly the cuts shrink on his body that night. They are pale, scabbed memories on his body the next day. The image of her is raw in their stead, twice as vivid, twice as taunting. He thinks that the last thing he will see before he dies, whenever he may die, will be the shape of her lips.

 

 

 

 

 

The pipe bends, rather than breaks. He leaves his own shape in the metal, tries not to think about what that might signify. Tries not to consider his own bending. 

She has stripped the pride from his endurance. Perhaps this is a good thing. Pride is against his teachings, even if it has been blood-deep in every one of his teachers.

He wonders how much dark energy has slipped into his bloodstream here, or if her shadow made a home in his thoughts earlier than he realized. Jabiim, Ord Cestus, Ohma D’Un, Queyta—countless fights, countless fallen, countless swipes at her shadow, constant echoes of her shadow, her body, her breath. Stars’ end, he can _taste_ her: that hateful blood-honey taunt that echoes in his nose and mouth every time she leaves the cell. He swallows against it now, sweet-metallic on the back of his dry tongue, pulling him back to the present; he wonders what she tastes like, and he slams his head into the pipe hard enough to crack his skull.

No such mercy. The mask tightens on his skull, dredges up memories and visions that block out the Force. That still eludes his grasp, except when he is with her. After which, each day, he is stronger than the last.

He wonders how long her marks will last, if not on his skin then in his head.

 

 

 

 

 

Foremost, though she does mark his skin. Daily and avidly.

No knife today: she doesn’t need help. Only her nails,  scraping new cuts up and down his spine. He has no purchase on her, the chains holding his hands back, but she is strong and lithe against him and needs no help to balance as she holds him by the shredded shoulders, braced with one leg on the floor. And he asks for more. Has to, of course, to make up for the healed ones.

There is always an excuse. 

Her thoughts are raw and ragged, unsteady. He cannot sense thoughts but he feels the echo of her fear, her unease. New and old.  Can sense it fading, if briefly, as her hips push against his, giving no ground. She is grounding herself here as much as she is unwittingly grounding him.

There is comfort in the torment. It isn’t new.

_Invite your_ —

_your enemy_ —

There is always an excuse, and always a better, brighter path. Her heartbeat wars with his, hard in his throat as her hips grind down against his. He feels her—her ferocious unhappy blinding pleasure—and her bones pressing to his, raw and welcome. He leans in, and it clears his thoughts. He has learned, steadily, to count on that. The Sith-mask does not think it needs to work with Sith hands on him. All over him.

Always an excuse. Use it, Kenobi.

He concentrates, clears his head as he arches against her, through their clothes, body guided by pain and wanting, but his head still carries his training. His thoughts are capable of deeper transgression than his body. In his head he sinks _into_ her. Sees down into the chasm of her heart, how deep down goes the fear and the rage, and how she does wield it as a Dark Jedi, winding her fury tight to her heart.

_into the light, within you_ —

Her nails sink hard into the burns on his shoulders, now, almost muscle-deep, as she braces against him, exhales a bright, fierce sigh against his mouth. A breath he can taste, can feel,her mouth not a fingerbreadth away from his. His grip flickers, eyes rolling up, but he glimpses the pipe overhead, dented in the shape of his head, and he can, at last, focus. Has earned it.

Turning his head, he catches her mouth against his.

The kiss he gives her is gentle, terrible in its gentleness. He feels her mouth freeze against his, her body coiling tight enough to snap.

_Come into the light, dark Jedi,_ he’s thinking, he’s letting her feel, and the Force is bright and pure in his head if not wholly under his control, _you are not lost_ —

For the first time in weeks, he is capable of compassion. Now that he has learned to think of it as a weapon. His mouth brushes hers lightly and his soul is, spitefully, good. Let her taste it. He doesn’t think it will work. But he supposes it’s the worst thing he can do to her at the moment.

She breaks the kiss, looks at him furiously, and he meets her eyes. He wants her to see it. The Force, not beaten out of him, not bedded out of him either. Stronger than either of them.

Him included. The print of her lips buzzes over his own; he aches, still, between the legs, unsatisfied. His own fault, now, he supposes.

She sees it, all right.  She backhands him across the mouth and leaves without a word.

Her hand doesn’t knock the kiss off. Alone, he presses his lips together and finds he isn’t sure what he wants—aside, of course, from broken chains and a working lightsaber. But he knows he’s not lost himself, no matter how much he might feel it. His heart beats hard, assuredly his own.

Kindness can be a cruelty. He likes himself least of all for using it as such, now. Especially after cruelty, for so long, has been its own form of kindness.

 

 

 

 

 

The next day, she leaves him to the droids; the day after, he is visited just once, the droid offering him food that writhes in its bowl, old fish-flesh alive with muscle maggots. Vastly worse than poison. He’s stronger, now, but he swallows with deep, visceral regret. Before he summons up his last reserves of the Force to kill them, before the droid leaves, he feels them bite down inside him, chewing into his built-back muscle tissue. How easy it would be to lose it again.

He does manage to kill them, though, and fairly quickly once he’s left to himself. This, he can ask of the Force: he has half a hundred half-sentient little lives in his mental grip; he feels them inside him, before he brings the Force down.

It feels good to kill something wicked within him. He wishes he could do the same work in his soul.

Another blank day. Then the next, the door opens, but she does not set foot inside. He lolls his head, does not look at her. Does not give ground in the image of his weakness. Her mask is back in place, and his must be too.

“I will keep you weak, Kenobi,” she hisses from a safe distance, leaves as fast as her feet will carry her. Troubled, dark energy echoes in her wake. Not his. Not his problem. He won’t ask for more from her—certainly won’t beg. She never got that out of him. (He thinks.)

 

 

 

 

 

He waits, solitary, then. For the break, for the rescue.

When the moment comes—Alpha in his cell, the pipe bursting, an instant battlefield camaraderie and a sense of purpose even as they wade through filthy knee-high water—he finds it easy to pretend he never doubted. Pulls the mask off and the world goes white and healing and he has purpose, he never lost his purpose, the Force heals the ravages in his thoughts as well so long as he keeps moving. So long as he fights hard enough to outpace his thoughts.

He’s alive, Anakin is alive, Rattatak heaving with sudden violence, and the Force seems to burn him forward, through the citadel, through all of it. The world moves quickly, now, after weeks of bloodborne sluggishness. _He_ moves, quicker than he thinks.

He leaves on Asajj Ventress’s own ship, with her master’s lightsaber in his hand.

 

 

 

 

 

That night, far away from her, Alpha slapped up and down in bacta in the ship’s other bedroom, Rattatak in distant chaos, he dreams of her and is not surprised. Dreams of her weeping in the mud—memories and nightmares. Dreams of her face, warped with pleasure in the reflection of a knife—not nightmares, though they wake him up, harsh and loud.

Awake, he puts a hand on the healing cuts on his chest, though no further. Feels the print of her—her knife, her thoughts, her resilient heartbeat. Rubs a hand over his own feverish face. Sweat has soaked his hair to his forehead. Healing hurts, burns, and some of him will scar, and some of him will keep the ache alive.

It costs, to invite the enemy in.

He slaps himself lightly, a perfunctory hand on the back of both cheeks, then stands. Now, at least he can—well, he’s in no state to meditate, but he can drill. Can set his screaming muscles back to work: he picks up Ky Narec’s lightsaber, tosses it hand to hand as he unsheaths the blade of light.

Drilling does not banish her. Nor, with her master’s lightsaber in hand, should it. He strokes down hard, harder, through the air and knows, white-knuckling against its hilt, that she will come after him.

Alone, he thinks, this time. They don’t need a battlefield, not when his body offers itself up for the siege.

Perhaps the light will wield him, will get her. Or perhaps, when next they meet, it will have the decency to look away from them both.

 

**Author's Note:**

> WHAT A FUCKED UP SHIP ORIGIN, LIKE, RIGHT? THANKS, CANON. LOVE U TOO.
> 
> Really, though: credit to the comics for giving me the Trojan Horse-esque gift of "three weeks of torture leading into a lifetime of screaming mutual morally-muddled monomania". Credit to the novels: to The Cestus Deception for Asajj's histrionic murder-lust-pretzel on REALLY AMAZING DISPLAY and for the mechanics of her Force-masking playing with his Force-sensitivity as well as weird little details about how creepy-nice she smells, and to Wild Space for showing me the limits of how much pain Obi-Wan Kenobi's physical form can take, which are "apparently none, just shove a lightsaber in it, he'll THANK YOU." To Clone Wars, too, for that. Special credit to the Clone Wars ep "The Hidden Enemy" if only for the way Obi-Wan cold-hot snarls "my sweet" at Asajj the first time we see him see her. Oh, man.
> 
> All of which is also to say that I think that all of Asajj's media adds up into a pretty nice timeline—which is certainly not true of all characters/arcs that show up in books & comics as well as the show, but I do think it's true of her. There's nothing in the canon that needs decanonizing. I'm planning to write more of her in later, greyer places, and this will still hold true.
> 
> Also I am sorry for the wreck of Obi-Wan Kenobi's mortal shell but if I have to apologize for that then what the HELL do the people paid to write Star Wars mixed media have to do.


End file.
